Part 39

But this phantasy, which has for a long time been ready, need not be experienced again in sleep; it suffices if it is, so to speak, “touched off.” What I mean is this: If a few notes are struck and someone says, as in _Don Juan_: “That is from _Figaro’s Wedding_ by Mozart,” memories suddenly surge up within me, none of which I can in the next moment recall to consciousness. The characteristic phrase serves as an entrance station from which a complete whole is simultaneously put in motion. It need not be different in the case of unconscious thought. The psychic station which opens the way to the whole guillotine phantasy is set in motion by the waking stimulus. This phantasy, however, is not passed in review during sleep, but only afterwards in waking memory. Upon awakening one remembers the details of the phantasy, which in the dream was regarded as a whole. There is, withal, no means of making sure that one really has remembered anything which has been dreamed. The same explanation, namely, that one is dealing with finished phantasies which have been set in motion as wholes by the waking stimulus, may be applied to still other dreams which proceed from a waking stimulus—for instance to the battle dream of Napoleon at the explosion of the bomb. I do not mean to assert that all waking dreams admit of this explanation, or that the problem of the accelerated discharge of ideas in dreams is to be altogether solved in this manner.

We must not neglect the relation of this secondary elaboration of the dream content to the other factors in the dream activity. Might the procedure be as follows: the dream-creating factors, the impulse to condense, the necessity of evading the censor, and the regard for dramatic fitness in the psychic resources of the dream—these first of all create a provisional dream content, and this is then subsequently modified until it satisfies the exactions of a second instance? This is hardly probable. It is necessary rather to assume that the demands of this instance are from the very beginning lodged in one of the conditions which the dream must satisfy, and that this condition, just like those of condensation, of censorship, and of dramatic fitness, simultaneously affect the whole mass of material in the dream thoughts in an inductive and selective manner. But of the four conditions necessary for the dream formation, the one last recognised is the one whose exactions appear to be least binding upon the dream. That this psychic function, which undertakes the so-called secondary elaboration of the dream content is identical with the work of our waking thought may be inferred with great probability from the following consideration:—Our waking (foreconscious) thought behaves towards a given object of perception just exactly as the function in question behaves towards the dream content. It is natural for our waking thought to bring about order in the material of perception, to construct relationships, and to make it subject to the requirements of an intelligible coherence. Indeed, we go too far in doing this; the tricks of prestidigitators deceive us by taking advantage of this intellectual habit. In our effort to put together the sensory impressions which are offered to us in a comprehensible manner, we often commit the most bizarre errors and even distort the truth of the material we have before us. Proofs for this are too generally familiar to need more extended consideration here. We fail to see errors in a printed page because our imagination pictures the proper words. The editor of a widely-read French paper is said to have risked the wager that he could print the words “from in front” or “from behind” in every sentence of a long article without any of his readers noticing it. He won the wager. A curious example of incorrect associations years ago caught my attention in a newspaper. After the session of the French chamber, at which Dupuy quelled a panic caused by the explosion of a bomb thrown into the hall by an anarchist by saying calmly, “La séance continue,” the visitors in the gallery were asked to testify as to their impression of the attempted assassination. Among them were two provincials. One of these told that immediately after the conclusion of a speech he had heard a detonation, but had thought that it was the custom in parliament to fire a shot whenever a speaker had finished. The other, who had apparently already heard several speakers, had got the same idea, with the variation, however, that he supposed this shooting to be a sign of appreciation following an especially successful speech.

Thus the psychic instance which approaches the dream content with the demand that it must be intelligible, which subjects it to preliminary interpretation, and in doing so brings about a complete misunderstanding of it, is no other than our normal thought. In our interpretation the rule will be in every case to disregard the apparent coherence of the dream as being of suspicious origin, and, whether the elements are clear or confused, to follow the same regressive path to the dream material.

We now learn upon what the scale of quality in dreams from confusion to clearness—mentioned above, page 305—essentially depends. Those parts of the dream with which the secondary elaboration has been able to accomplish something seem to us clear; those where the power of this activity has failed seem confused. Since the confused parts of the dream are often also those which are less vividly imprinted, we may conclude that the secondary dream-work is also responsible for a contribution to the plastic intensity of the individual dream structures.

If I were to seek an object of comparison for the definitive formation of the dream as it manifests itself under the influence of normal thinking, none better offers itself than those mysterious inscriptions with which _Die Fliegende Blaetter_ has so long amused its readers. The reader is supposed to find a Latin inscription concealed in a given sentence which, for the sake of contrast, is in dialect and as scurrilous as possible in significance. For this purpose the letters are taken from their groupings in syllables and are newly arranged. Now and then a genuine Latin word results, at other places we think that we have abbreviations of such words before us, and at still other places in the inscription we allow ourselves to be carried along over the senselessness of the disjointed letters by the semblance of disintegrated portions or by breaks in the inscription. If we do not wish to respond to the jest we must give up looking for an inscription, must take the letters as we see them, and must compose them into words of our mother tongue, unmindful of the arrangement which is offered.

I shall now undertake a résumé of this extended discussion of the dream activity. We were confronted by the question whether the mind exerts all its capabilities to the fullest development in dream formation, or only a fragment of its capabilities, and these restricted in their activity. Our investigation leads us to reject such a formulation of the question entirely as inadequate to our circumstances. But if we are to remain on the same ground when we answer as that on which the question is urged upon us, we must acquiesce in two conceptions which are apparently opposed and mutually exclusive. The psychic activity in dream formation resolves itself into two functions—the provision of the dream thoughts and the transformation of these into the dream content. The dream thoughts are entirely correct, and are formed with all the psychic expenditure of which we are capable; they belong to our thoughts which have not become conscious, from which our thoughts which have become conscious also result by means of a certain transposition. Much as there may be about them which is worth knowing and mysterious, these problems have no particular relation to the dream, and have no claim to be treated in connection with dream problems. On the other hand, there is that second portion of the activity which changes the unconscious thoughts into the dream content, an activity peculiar to dream life and characteristic of it. Now, this peculiar dream-work is much further removed from the model of waking thought than even the most decided depreciators of psychic activity in dream formation have thought. It is not, one might say, more negligent, more incorrect, more easily forgotten, more incomplete than waking thought; it is something qualitatively altogether different from waking thought, and therefore not in any way comparable to it. It does not in general think, calculate, or judge at all, but limits itself to transforming. It can be exhaustively described if the conditions which must be satisfied at its creation are kept in mind. This product, the dream, must at any cost be withdrawn from the censor, and for this purpose the dream activity makes use of the _displacement of psychic intensities_ up to the transvaluation of all psychic values; thoughts must exclusively or predominatingly be reproduced in the material of visual and acoustic traces of memory, and this requirement secures for the dream-work the _regard for presentability_, which meets the requirement by furnishing new displacements. Greater intensities are (probably) to be provided than are each night at the disposal of the dream thoughts, and this purpose is served by the prolific _condensation_ which is undertaken with the component parts of the dream thoughts. Little attention is paid to the logical relations of the thought material; they ultimately find a veiled representation in the _formal_ peculiarities of the dream. The affects of the dream thoughts undergo lesser changes than their presentation content. As a rule they are suppressed; where they are preserved they are freed from the presentations and put together according to their similarity. Only one part of the dream-work—the revision varying in amount, made by the partially roused conscious thought—at all agrees with the conception which the authors have tried to extend to the entire activity of dream formation.

VII THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE DREAM ACTIVITIES

Among the dreams which I have heard from others there is one which at this point is especially worthy of our attention. It was told to me by a female patient who in turn had heard it in a lecture on dreams. Its original source is unknown to me. This dream evidently made a deep impression upon the lady, as she went so far as to imitate it, _i.e._ to repeat the elements of this dream in a dream of her own in order to express by this transference her agreement with it in a certain point.

The essential facts of this illustrative dream are as follows: For days and nights a father had watched at the sick-bed of his child. After the child died, he retired to rest in an adjoining room, leaving the door ajar, however, so as to enable him to look from his room into the other, where the corpse lay surrounded by burning candles. An old man, who was left as a watch, sat near the corpse murmuring prayers. After sleeping a few hours the father dreamed that _the child stood near his bed clasping his arms and calling out reproachfully, “Father, don’t you see that I am burning?”_ The father woke and noticed a bright light coming from the adjoining room. Rushing in, he found the old man asleep, and the covers and one arm of the beloved body burned by the fallen candle.

The meaning of this affecting dream is simple enough, and the explanation given by the lecturer, as my patient reported it, was correct. The bright light coming through the open door into the eyes of the sleeper produced the same impression on him as if he had been awake; namely, that a fire had been started near the corpse by a falling candle. It is quite possible that on going to sleep he feared that the aged guardian was not equal to his task.

We can find nothing to change in this interpretation. We can add only that the contents of the dream must be over-determined, and that the talking of the child consisted of phrases that it had uttered while still living, which recalled to the father important events. Perhaps the complaint, “I am burning,” recalled the fever from which the child died, and the words quoted, “Father, don’t you see?” recalled an emotional occurrence unknown to us.

But after we have recognised the dream as a senseful occurrence which can be correlated with our psychic existence, it may be surprising that a dream should have taken place under circumstances which necessitated such immediate awakening. We also notice that the dream does not lack the wish-fulfilment. The child acts as if living; it warns the father itself; it comes to his bed and clasps his arms, as it probably did on the occasion which gave origin to the first part of the speech in the dream. It was for the sake of this wish-fulfilment that the father slept a moment longer. The dream triumphed over the conscious reflection because it could show the child once more alive. If the father had awakened first, and had then drawn the conclusion which led him into the adjoining room, he would have shortened the child’s life by this one moment.

The peculiar feature in this brief dream which engages our interest is quite plain. So far we have mainly endeavoured to ascertain wherein the secret meaning of the dream consists, in what way this is to be discovered, and what means the dream-work uses to conceal it. In other words, our greatest interest has hitherto centred on the problems of interpretation. We now encounter a dream, however, which can be easily explained, the sense of which is plainly presented; and we notice that in spite of this fact the dream still preserves the essential features which plainly differentiate our dreaming from our conscious thinking, and thus clearly demands an explanation. After clearing up all the problems of interpretation, we can still feel how imperfect our psychology of the dream is.

Before entering, however, into this new territory, let us stop and reflect whether we have not missed something important on our way hither. For it must be frankly admitted that we have been traversing the easy and comfortable part of our journey. Hitherto all the paths we have followed have led, if I mistake not, to light, to explication, and to full understanding, but from the moment that we wish to penetrate deeper into the psychic processes of the dream all paths lead into darkness. It is quite impossible to explain the dream as a psychic process, for to explain means to trace to the known, and as yet we do not possess any psychological knowledge under which we can range what may be inferred from our psychological investigation of dreams as their fundamental explanation. On the contrary, we shall be compelled to build a series of new assumptions concerning the structure of the psychic apparatus and its active forces; and this we shall have to be careful not to carry beyond the simplest logical concatenation, as its value may otherwise merge into uncertainty. And, even if we should make no mistake in our conclusions, and take cognisance of all the logical possibilities involved, we shall still be threatened with complete failure in our solution through the probable incompleteness of our elemental data. It will also be impossible to gain, or at least to establish, an explanation for the construction and workings of the psychic instrument even through a most careful investigation of the dream or any other _single_ activity. On the contrary, it will be necessary for this end to bring together whatever appears decisively as constant after a comparative study of a whole series of psychic activities. Thus the psychological conceptions which we shall gain from an analysis of the dream process will have to wait, as it were, at the junction point until they can be connected with the results of other investigations which may have advanced to the nucleus of the same problem from another starting point.

(_a_) _Forgetting in Dreams._

I propose, then, first, to turn to a subject which has given rise to an objection hitherto unnoticed, threatening to undermine the foundation of our work in dream interpretation. It has been objected in more than one quarter that the dream which we wish to interpret is really unknown to us, or, to be more precise, that we have no assurance of knowing it as it has really occurred (see p. 37). What we recollect of the dream, and what we subject to our methods of interpretation, is in the first place disfigured through our treacherous memory, which seems particularly unfitted to retain the dream, and which may have omitted precisely the most important part of the dream content. For, when we pay attention to our dreams, we often find cause to complain that we have dreamed much more than we remember; that, unfortunately, we know nothing more than this one fragment, and that even this seems to us peculiarly uncertain. On the other hand, everything assures us that our memory reproduces the dream not only fragmentarily but also delusively and falsely. Just as on the one hand we may doubt whether the material dreamt was really as disconnected and confused as we remember it, so on the other hand may we doubt whether a dream was as connected as we relate it; whether in the attempt at reproduction we have not filled in the gaps existing or caused by forgetfulness with new material arbitrarily chosen; whether we have not embellished, rounded off, and prepared the dream so that all judgment as to its real content becomes impossible. Indeed, one author (Spitta[64]) has expressed his belief that all that is orderly and connected is really first put into the dream during our attempt to recall it. Thus we are in danger of having wrested from our hands the very subject whose value we have undertaken to determine.

In our dream interpretations we have thus far ignored these warnings. Indeed, the demand for interpretation was, on the contrary, found to be no less perceptible in the smallest, most insignificant, and most uncertain ingredients of the dream content than in those containing the distinct and definite parts. In the dream of Irma’s injection we read, “I quickly called in Dr. M.,” and we assumed that even this small addendum would not have gotten into the dream if it had not had a special derivation. Thus we reached the history of that unfortunate patient to whose bed I “quickly” called in the older colleague. In the apparently absurd dream which treated the difference between 51 and 56 as _quantité négligé_, the number 51 was repeatedly mentioned. Instead of finding this self-evident or indifferent, we inferred from it a second train of thought in the latent content of the dream which led to the number 51. By following up this clue we came to the fears which placed 51 years as a limit of life, this being in most marked contrast to a dominant train of thought which boastfully knew no limit to life. In the dream “Non Vixit” I found, as an insignificant interposition that I at first overlooked, the sentence, “As P. does not understand him, Fl. asks me,” &c. The interpretation then coming to a standstill, I returned to these words, and found through them the way to the infantile phantasy, which appeared in the dream thoughts as an intermediary point of junction. This came about by means of the poet’s verses:

Seldom have you understood me, Seldom have I understood you, But when we got into the mire, We at once understood each other.

Every analysis will demonstrate by examples how the most insignificant features of the dream are indispensable to the analysis, and how the finishing of the task is delayed by the fact that attention is not at first directed to them. In the same way we have in the interpretation of dreams respected every nuance of verbal expression found in the dream; indeed, if we were confronted by a senseless or insufficient wording betraying an unsuccessful effort to translate the dream in the proper style, we have even respected these defects of expression. In brief, what the authorities have considered arbitrary improvisation, concocted hastily to suit the occasion, we have treated like a sacred text. This contradiction requires an explanation.

It is in our favour, without disparagement to the authorities. From the viewpoint of our newly-acquired understanding concerning the origin of the dream, the contradictions fall into perfect agreement. It is true that we distort the dream in our attempt to reproduce it; and herein we find another instance of what we have designated as the often misunderstood secondary elaboration of the dream through the influence of normal thinking. But this distortion is itself only a part of the elaboration to which the dream thoughts are regularly subjected by virtue of the dream censor. The authorities have here divined or observed that part of the dream distortion most obviously at work; to us this is of little importance, for we know that a more prolific work of distortion, not so easily comprehensible, has already chosen the dream from among the concealed thoughts as its object. The authorities err only in considering the modifications of the dream while it is being recalled and put in words as arbitrary and insoluble; and hence, as likely to mislead us in the interpretation of the dream. We over-estimate the determination of the psychic. There is nothing arbitrary in this field. It can quite generally be shown that a second train of thought immediately undertakes the determination of the elements which have been left undetermined by the first. I wish, _e.g._, to think quite voluntarily of a number. This, however, is impossible. The number that occurs to me is definitely and necessarily determined by thoughts within me which may be far from my momentary intention.[FJ] Just as far from arbitrary are the modifications which the dream experiences through the revision of the waking state. They remain in associative connection with the content, the place of which they take, and serve to show us the way to this content, which may itself be the substitute for another.

In the analysis of dreams with patients I am accustomed to institute the following proof of this assertion, which has never proved unsuccessful. If the report of a dream appears to me at first difficult to understand, I request the dreamer to repeat it. This he rarely does in the same words. The passages wherein the expression is changed have become known to me as the weak points of the dream’s disguise, which are of the same service to me as the embroidered mark on Siegfried’s raiment was to Hagen. The analysis may start from these points. The narrator has been admonished by my announcement that I mean to take special pains to solve the dream, and immediately, under the impulse of resistance, he protects the weak points of the dream’s disguise, replacing the treacherous expressions by remoter ones. He thus calls my attention to the expressions he has dropped. From the efforts made to guard against the solution of the dream, I can also draw conclusions as to the care with which the dream’s raiment was woven.